An old fellow who looked like a dishwasher stood near the door. I asked, Oysters fresh tonight? He glanced at me to see whether I was stupid or simple. “Fresh?” he said. “Hell, junior, they ain’t out of the crick yet.”
Somewhere in this nation in love with contests and records, there must be one for the Most Cluttered Tumbledown Cookshop. I put forth Bowens Island (“Since 1946”). After trying a couple of mishung, locked doors, we found an open one marked with a cardboard sign: ENTRANCE FOR TONIGHT. The ceiling was so low that from the stilled ceiling-fan a coat hanger dangled as warning. It’s possible there were actually walls behind the thick graffiti rather than simply more graffiti layered into stratigraphies of names and dates. Like a spring tide, inscriptions rose up the walls and overflowed to the ceilings, drained down onto the blackened windowpanes, rose again to cover stacked boxes, signs, framed pictures, and — I’m sure — right across the forehead of any diner sitting still too long.
Against a wall was a stack of ten televisions (when one gave out, it served as a base for the next) and four busted radios (crumbling antiques that had once carried war news from H. V. Kaltenborn and the shadowy voice of Lamont Cranston and the creaking door of Inner Sanctum); nearby was a partly melted jukebox (the Inkspots, “To Each His Own”) and a hair-dryer frightfully like some primitive electrocution machine. On a cola case I could make out a graffito: THIS PLACE IS PLUM WORE OUT.
The tangle of objects ceased at a doorway labeled in large letters over darkened scrawlings, OYSTER EATERS ONLY. Inside sat a cadaverous man, shaggily bearded, pulling meat from a barbecued carcass that was slowly becoming skeletal to match his appearance. Covering the dining tables were newspapers and in the center were holes to shove the remains of a meal — bones, oyster shells, shrimp carapaces, that pouty kid — into buckets below. At the other end of the room, a slender, elderly black man tended three bushels of oysters under wet burlap steaming atop a sheet of steel heated by bottled-gas flames. The air, full of Old Bay Seasoning, stunned my eyes and throat until they translated the fragrance into appetite.
We were there for “roasted” oysters, shrimp and grits, and Frogmore stew. (No luck on the pine-bark version.) The Frogmore was a toothsome mix of boiled shrimp, chopped kielbasa, potatoes, and a few cuts of corn-on-the-cob in a broth infused with Old Bay Seasoning (but without amphibians — Frogmore is a Low Country settlement). The shrimp and grits were a pot au feu of the titular ingredients with diced sausage, green peppers, celery, sweet onion, and — all together now — Old Bay Seasoning. (I once heard of a Low Country vanilla pie made without that Baltimore elixir, but that’s only rumor.)
As good as these dishes were and as heartily as we shared them, what we’d come for arrived last: oysters from Folly Creek right outside the back door via the wet burlap on the grill. They were piled on an oven tray with oyster knives and heavy towels alongside. The sharp shells were still cemented into fist-sized natural clumps that made opening them a puzzle of how to find a way into the cluster without letting one’s blood (second Old Bay rumor: its color is to hide lacerations from inexpertly opened mollusks). The oysters — small, sweet, and fresh — had elicited a testimonial graffito above our heads: THEM OYSTERS PUT THE GUMPTION BACK IN ME.
A meal in a place like Bowens Island can make up for days of forgettable, traveler’s fare and even help atone for one’s sin of dining at somebody’s Chez Somebody, and that meant I owed the Island a few more visits to clear my slate, a penance to be looked forward to. Some months later, Pat McWhirter sent me a news clipping: Bowens Island had burned to the ground. So now atonement would have to rest on a few bowls of pine-bark stew.
10
Meeting Miss Flossie
SOUTH OF CHARLESTON the magenta line twisted through marshes, estuaries, rivers, and creeks with jolly names for those who love vowels (Toogoodoo, Wadmalaw, Ashepoo, Coosaw), on a generally southwesterly course all the way to Beaufort where the Bogger anchored for several hours. The town, almost encircled by handsome marshlands, shows off to best advantage from its riverside of antebellum houses and live oaks that form a scene either classic or clichéd, depending on one’s Southern experience or sense of the sardonic. Bay Street was empty of all but the Sunday quiets broken only by grackles rattling from moss-strung oaks and the crunch of quintillions of fallen acorns breaking crisply and loudly under every footfall as if in remonstrance.
Embodied Southern history today often comes down through restored mansions and manicured battlefields that, taken alone, become distortions feeding Northern perceptions of the people. A South Carolinian bookseller said to me, “We exist in the Yankee mind somewhere between Gone With the Wind and Tobacco Road.” There was a little of both in Beaufort, although along the river the former was ascendant.
With our only transport shank’s mare, we walked till — to mix the metaphor — our dogs barked, and we took rest in an antiquarian shop where I added to my book satchel (beginning to overflow into a carton) a Low Country history and a cookbook with a recipe for Egg Pie but nothing about pine-bark stew.
In the afternoon, the boat raised her hook and ran due south down the widening Beaufort River, past the Marines at Parris Island and on into Port Royal Sound before jogging westward to get behind shoe-shaped Hilton Head Island for an anchorage there off Harbour Town; being neither town nor harbor, it was as authentically American as its spelling and bogus lighthouse.
We went ashore but got caught in a drizzle and dodged into a shop selling beach hats and T-shirts. From Baltimore I’d been keeping in my notebook a page of slogans on Ts, thinking a progressing list of them would reveal certain aspects of the territory; there I copied down two: OLD GUYS RULE and LET’S GO SHOPPING. When the rain stopped briefly, we walked on among the landscaped acres but again had to duck into another place, this one a clothing boutique where I could have bought a rabbit-fur sweater for twelve-hundred dollars. (Hilton Head was once home to a Gullah community of freed slaves who ate rabbits rather than wore them.) By the door was a flyer advertising an ENVIRO-TOUR! to try to spot a manatee or perhaps glimpse some other fauna whose querencia had been flattened by twenty-five golf courses and an annual load of more than two-million tourists, of whom we were a guilty — if reluctant — pair. A peril of group travel.
On the return to the boat, we cut through a marina hoisting several Jolly Rogers. Coming ashore was an affluent yachtsman wearing not a blue blazer and skipper’s cap but the new dress of the line: pressed denims and polished loafers, head wrapped in a bandanna. He saw Q and gave a one-eyed, Long-John-Silver squint intended as a wink, although it looked more like a nervous twitch that she acknowledged with an “Aarrhh.”
Respite from such excess lay only a mile distant and across the sound called Calibogue (four syllables, the final two as if one stroke over par), on the north end of Daufuskie Island, the Waterway forming its entire western shore. Large marshes have thwarted a bridge there, and the only access to Daufuskie (rhymes with the dusky) was by boat. Isolation of the island before the recolonizing of Hilton Head by realty privateers was measured not by miles but by topography: it’s surrounded by two rivers, one sound, an ocean, and the salt marshes. Such impediments helped enhance and preserve local Gullah life — with its distinctive blend of African and American ways and languages — until our time brought relentless real-estate agents. On the day we were there, only about a dozen Gullahs remained on Daufuskie, average age about seventy, all descendants of slaves who worked the indigo and, later, cotton plantations. Agriculture disappeared, and much of the island had returned to woods, although development from Hilton Head was creeping across the sound.
The Bog Trotter made fast to a narrow dock near the Cooper River Cemetery. At the small store there, I met the owner, a large fellow with amusing takes on local history, Wick Scurry, who invited several of us onto a school bus to show us Daufuskie stem to stern. The island had become known as the setting of Pat Conroy’s The Water Is Wide (and a couple of movies made from the book) about his year ther
e in 1970 when he taught grammar-school children who allegedly didn’t know the name of the ocean on their eastern shore. Scurry believed the book exaggerates the naïveté of the Gullah: for years they had been making boat trips to Savannah — only eleven miles away by water — and by the ’70s they had television and had seen local men return from a couple of overseas wars. While myths of such innocence are always a lure to city people, it was still true that the Daufuskie Gullah were distinctive in several ways, perhaps none more intriguing than their speech. The island was a place I’d long wanted to visit, so when Scurry ended his little tour, I stayed back to talk with him about the people because it was clear he, a white man, for some time had moved easily between well-heeled tourists of Hilton Head and the Gullah on Daufuskie. Above all I wanted to sit down with a senior resident who knew the island as it once was.
Scurry made it clear, in a way politely Southern, that for years the Gullah have been the object of journalists and academics bearing tape recorders and cameras to conduct invasive and tiresome interviews. My curiosity edged toward guilt but got a reprieve when he at last offered inexplicably, “Would you like to meet Miss Flossie?” For his store, she sometimes made her rendition of the celebrated Daufuskie deviled crabs, a couple of which Q and I had just polished off. “I don’t think she’ll say much or be comfortable unless I’m there,” Scurry said, “and I’ve got to leave here soon, but I’ll take you over for a few minutes.” I understood I was to be a mere button on his shirt: two eyes, nothing more.
In his electric cart, we followed a sand lane a short distance into the trees where we came upon a clearing with a pair of small frame-houses. We climbed through a fence to enter by the back stoop, Scurry calling her name as we went, Miss Flossie appearing at last in the doorway, portable phone in her hand, the flicker of a television coming down the darkened hallway. So much for isolation. She led us to her dining room, a place made even smaller by a big table piled with papers and mailed flyers, in a corner the glowing television screen, her easy chair pointed at it. Atop the set, beneath a picture of the Black Madonna, was a photograph of her late husband, placed so she could see him during commercials.
Miss Flossie, I guessed, was in her seventies, tall for her generation, thin but straight in the spine, wearing a long dress, her hair tightly bound up in a red kerchief. She could have stepped into the Savannah of 1890 and gone unnoticed. Scurry made small talk, seeming rather uncomfortable for having brought unannounced strangers into her home, although she was cordial and apparently content to be interrupted. He declined her offer to sit, so we stood, and I just tried to absorb her words, her speech, to imagine what it would have been had she slipped into full Gullah dialect. As it was, her sentences had the lilt one hears from African descendants in the British Caribbean islands, and it was fast enough I missed some words. Scurry would later tell me that she could have lost me in a flash had she wanted to; I asked could she lose him (who wasn’t native to Daufuskie). “No,” he said, “but I can’t speak it.”
Only rarely on my travels do I stumble into crevices in the wall of time, openings one briefly can enter into another era before it evaporates like morning miasma. There she stood, surely from generations gone, looking away as if we weren’t really present, her words sweetly rolling forth, she who knew stories that I would never hear, some that nobody would hear ever again. Her age — not in years but in experience — seemed beyond anything I had seen before. I almost believed the moment wasn’t truly happening, that I’d not really found a crevice, that I was merely dreaming. But we were there, voyagers looking in from a time no longer hers.
Several days after our voyage ended, I phoned Wick to see whether he’d be able to arrange a longer visit he’d suggested, but I think his heart wasn’t in it, and it didn’t work out, and now, weeks later, I’m not sure I really wanted it to. I like the mythic Miss Flossie whose evanescent appearance has given me a perception of the Gullahs that may outlast their time on the island, her face emerging whenever I happen onto the name Daufuskie.
Once Q and I were again home from the Waterway, an antiquarian-bookshop owner showed me a scarce item, Marcellus Whaley’s 1925 The Old Types Pass — Gullah Sketches of the Carolina Sea Islands. Much of the narrative is in that creolized dialect. Here are two sentences I take at random:
“Him ole ’nuff fuh know nuffah do sishaz dat,” declared Lizzie, in hearty accord. “Gal en boy all two, en man en’ ooman fuh sich ’uh mattah haffuh know ef dem git outtuh bed on de wrong side dem gwine bex ’tell dem guh sleep dah night.”
Spoken quickly with a certain lilt, it was something like what I heard in Miss Flossie’s dining room, but to read a whole book of it, despite the lure of its yellowed pages, demanded more than I could give.
When we got under way the next morning, I noticed on the chart how the remarkably shoe-shaped Hilton Head (should be Hilton’s Foot) seemed to be drop-kicking the little deflated football of Daufuskie westward. Scurry had told me of improved ferry-service across Calibogue Sound he would soon offer, his boat to run from the toe to the ball, but where Daufuskie will land, who could know? My guess is on the drop edge of yonder. Maybe its only hope is the curse a Negro conjurer years ago placed on the island: Lay no why mon nebba mek no dolla heah nebba. For a while, the old malediction had worked.
11
Fanny Kemble Speaks
FOR A FEW MILES the Bogger wound her way through a marshland of wide reaches of spartina — cord grasses — matured to the color of a wheat field ready for harvest. She crossed the Savannah River as if it were a roadway, entered Georgia, and headed southward below the slightly elevated land atop which sits Savannah, and there the magenta line further contorted. Of the four Waterway states below Virginia, Georgia has the fewest Intracoastal miles, but because it yields its leagues slowly, the distance seems greater, and, for those who find curving lines more interesting than straight ones, it’s an excellent run. Were a direct sailing line along the Georgia route possible, it would be about a hundred miles, but because the Intracoastal there makes extensive use of rivers and creeks, the distance increases by a third. Names color the passage: Ogeechee River, Bear River, Front River, Old Tea Kettle Creek, Little Mud River, Jekyll Creek, the Narrows. All of the encumbrances encourage powerboaters wanting to make time — those whose wakes rip the banks and can swamp small boats — to “bump outside” to the open Atlantic. But for those staying inside as we did, the shores are near and the requisite slower progress allows a deeper acquaintance with the territory.
To the traveler in quest of a human hand laid lightly onto nature, the Georgia coast is a sublime example in its almost total protection through a wedding of private and governmental ownership. Although the sixteenth-century Spanish probably had the opposite in mind when naming those outlying lands the Golden Isles, people who visit them in November, surrounded as the islands are by vast spreads of harvest-yellow spartina, will find them — at least in here — auriferous indeed.
Of the Georgia islands, only St. Simons and Jekyll have direct road connections to the mainland. While the former is widely developed, Jekyll, despite its resort amenities, must remain sixty-five percent in a “natural state” according to a decree Georgia declared when it bought the island for a park in 1947. Wassaw, Ossabaw, Blackbeard, Sapelo, and Wolf islands are all wildlife refuges of various sorts; a zoological foundation owns St. Catherines; a homeowners’ association controls Little Cumberland; and Little St. Simons, with its single road, is the last family-owned island in the Georgia chain. The National Park Service oversees the largest one, Cumberland.
Some of the islands — where an acre of tidal marsh is ten times as fertile as the richest one in Iowa — have been brought back from heavy human use and returned to nature. The exhausted cotton fields of Ossabaw began changing when it became Georgia’s first heritage preserve, now a place for scientific and educational endeavors — further evidence that profits from land need not be concomitant with depletion of the underlying resource. The result of
the innovations is that Georgia, even while allowing public access to all beaches up to the high-tide line, today has miles of coast that, if not pristine, still suggest what its shores looked like when Europeans began surveying them for military and mercantile enterprises. To excursionists arriving from the almost unbroken development of the Florida beaches, the change along the Georgia coast is stunning.
As the Bog Trotter made her way behind the Golden Isles and crossed the Altamaha River, I asked a man I’d often seen along the rail, his binoculars always at-the-ready, whether he’d picked up any noteworthy birds or beasts. The scowling fellow, whose attitude happily did not match his expression, said, “Slim pickings. I thought I’d see many more birds, even though the big migrations are pretty well completed now. But it’s been mostly cormorants, herons, and some pelicans. A couple of kingfishers.” I mentioned that early travelers along the inside passage spoke of large populations of many species. He shook his head. “The Christmas bird counts in lots of places across the country show numbers holding up, but I think that’s because these days more people are out there counting. I mean, how could numbers possibly stand steady along the ICW with all that new development?”
Only eight miles up the Altamaha was a different disappearance. On Butler Island in 1839, English actress Fanny Kemble (Mrs. Frances Butler) made her first visit to her husband’s rice plantation operated almost entirely by slaves. Her several weeks there and a couple more a few miles away on St. Simons Island exposed her to the realities of agricultural bondage. As a youth, Fanny took up the boards out of financial necessity, but she never lost hope for a life in letters. To help herself come to grips with the appalling conditions of the slaves — especially the women — she wrote and wrote, describing in precise and poignant detail a system largely kept hidden from outsiders. But after she left, for eighteen years she too considered publication of her forthright account a “breach of confidence” intolerable to her spouse, and she didn’t change her mind until 1863, long after her marriage was dissolved but soon following final proclamation of the Emancipation Act. In her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, her keen percipience and exactitude raise it from a powerful documentation of slavery (its accuracy now widely accepted despite earlier Southern challenges) into the canon of American historical literature. If you’ve ever toured an antebellum mansion, here’s something you may not have heard. While on her husband’s St. Simons estate, she wrote: